Real Life Wellness: How Stressed are you?

By Bill Hemmer
Picture yourself in a loin cloth and carrying a spear. You had just killed your meal for your family and feel really good about what you are taking back to your cave.  Suddenly you hear a terrible growl, and you spy a huge saber-tooth tiger stalking you and just about ready to pounce on you and your kill.

Your heart races, blood pressure rises, blood is pumped to your muscles, blood sugar is released from your liver and muscles and your fight or flight response kicks into high gear. You decide to run instead of fight, and you beat the tiger back to your cave where many other family members are around, so the tiger had no choice but to leave hungry.

Then you spend the next few days recovering. You are able to take naps if you need them. Your family does the hunting and gathering for you, so you can rest. It takes you almost a full week to fully recuperate after such as ordeal.

Now fast forward to today. Your body has stressful situations coming at you one after another after another. Maybe they aren’t as life threatening as a saber-tooth tiger, but stress is stress and your body reacts to it. The biggest difference between the caveman and you today is the amount of time you have to recover after any type of stressful event. You don’t have days or weeks to recover. You don’t even have minutes.

One stressful event occurs after another, day in, day out. So, your Functional Medicine providers has been specially trained to assess your ability to handle stress and then provide you with a step-by-step plan to rebuild your ability to handle the stress you are currently faced with.

But first, you need to understand more about your stress handling system; once you have a better understanding, you can control the effects of stress much more effectively. Basically, you have three different stress handling organs or glands. These three stress handling tissues include: your thyroid gland, your adrenal glands and your gonads (ovaries in women, testes in men).

Your thyroid gland controls your metabolism, if you are hot or cold and the way your body burns calories. Your adrenal glands sit on top of your kidneys and control your fight or flight response by producing a hormone called cortisol. Your gonads produce your sex hormones, estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. In truth, all three of these stress handling organs and glands work in conjunction with each other all the time.

But, year after year of chronic stress takes its toll on these glands and tissues, and they get fatigued. Everybody is different, so different people can handle different amounts of stress before they fall into a terrible fatigue state. Our job is to find out where you are right now in your level of fatigue and then build you a system to climb your way out of fatigue.

We will assess all three of the glands and organs. Extensive thyroid, adrenal and gonadal testing reveals hidden reasons for chronic problems like brain fog, chronic sickness, obesity and pain. These testing procedures are only done by specially trained practitioners, and most physicians have no idea that this type of testing is even available.

Once your assessments are completed, your systemized program will include: dietary, fitness, supplement and stress reducing recommendations based on your unique personality and chemistry. You are like no one else on Earth. So, your ability to handle stress is like nobody else. We are dedicated to providing you with personalized program options based solely on you, not anybody else.